Thor, motorsport and small talk: meaning and memory in the age of celebrity
I went to the Australian MotoGP on the weekend. My siblings and I took my Dad for his 70th birthday. He’d watched the series for years but never been in real life. It was wholesome. As you get older it suddenly hits that your opportunities to sit and talk about nothing with your parents are of limited number. What a gift to have the time to let conversations meander between the past and present. It felt precious, a true moment of re-connection.
We do see each other regularly but our time is generally limited to a meal or cup of tea, never a whole weekend with a road trip on either side. The race was held on Phillip Island—a 2 hour drive from Melbourne. On the way home my husband was sitting in the front, Dad was driving, which meant my brother, sister and I were sitting side-by-side in the back seat. We wondered aloud if the last time we’d done that was when we were kids.
We facetimed my Mum from the car and she asked if we were listening to U2, so we put on The Unforgettable Fire and basted in shared nostalgia for the rest of the drive. Dad tended to choose the music on our road trips as kids. Tom Petty. Roxy Music. Pink Floyd. He has a story about growing up on a farm in the Waikato and playing a game with his friends where they’d turn up Black Sabbath as loud as they could and see how far across the paddocks they could ride on their motorbikes and still hear it. So yeah, a weekend at the mecca of motorbikes was an appropriate gift, well received.
We had seats right across from the grid. I’m not a very close follower of the MotoGP but I am very into Formula One so I’m familiar with how race weekends run—the build up, the drama, the madness of the grid before a race start. MotoGP isn’t quite as crazy as F1 in terms of celebrity sightings, but there were a few. The biggest star present was Chris Hemsworth, and before the feature race he was wandering around just in front of us.
It's weird seeing globally famous people in the age of celebrity. The poor guy had a never-ending stream of people tapping him on the shoulder and asking for a photo. I cannot imagine doing that, mainly because I’m pretty introverted and wouldn’t approach a random stranger, let alone a well-known one.
That’s not the only reason though. I guess I’m interested in human connection that goes beyond the surface. In fact, I was laughing with my sister on the drive down about how much I hate school pick-up because of the expectation of small talk. I wouldn’t call myself a super intense person, but I am the type who’d prefer to bypass weather chat and dive straight into existential angst. So, my other reason for not getting a photo with Chris Hemsworth was because both the effort and the output felt meaningless to me. The people asking for photos didn’t even stop to speak to him (or vice versa), they just asked permission, took their photo and ran away wide-eyed. It seemed like these people wanted a photo simply as social media fodder to drive engagement. I’m being cynical—maybe some of them were huge Thor fans but it certainly didn’t look like it.
I saw a slightly different version of the same kind of interaction play out in a video from the Austin Grand Prix later that same day. A Daniel Ricciardo fan approached him for a photo, but she started the interaction by showing him a tattoo on her arm of a phrase he’d once said, “enjoy the butterflies.” It was advice Daniel gave to his younger self during his ill-fated McLaren days. This particular fan explained what the words meant to her, and Daniel’s reaction was honest and friendly. They shared a hug, took a photo and went their separate ways. Now that image would be the kind of fly-in-amber moment I’d want to keep. A preserved memory of a real moment of connection.
It feels like our instinct to capture and preserve has superseded our desire to experience moments as they unfold. You only need to go to a concert to see how the culture of experience has changed. Events are no longer a shared moment in time. They’re now both perpetual and audience-less— real moments viewed as if from a great distance through tiny screens, then relegated to the forgotten and unwatched depths of our camera rolls. Stored on servers in windowless rooms for the rest of time.
Maybe that’s why Coldplay’s Glasto set in 2024 was so well-reviewed as it happened.
“From the field, Elle Hunt says: “I am in fact now fixed.” Get Coldplay on prescription, stat”
Chris Martin forced a collective moment upon the crowd and they lapped it up, as if all they needed was for someone to tell them to put down their phones and live again. Martin was so effective in his effort that I can’t embed the actual Glasto performance because there isn’t a single version of it online. Annoying! But so right. This version is from Sydney a few months later and uses the same ‘bit’.
The public asks two things of artists: to create and to perform. Creation usually happens behind closed doors—in studios and on sets. Performance has, prior to this current cultural moment, been expected only in spaces with clear edges – on stages and screens, viewed on gallery walls or heard through headphones.
The fact that we now all carry the ability to capture and preserve moments in our pockets means the role of artists today is much more heavily weighted towards performance, and the boundary between ‘real’ and ‘pretend’ is virtually invisible. Was Chris Hemsworth being asked to perform with every new photo request? Were those micro performances at all related to his work as an actor?
He was at the MotoGP because he grew up on Phillip Island and his Dad used to race motorbikes around the circuit. The annual pilgrimage to the event is no-doubt filled with personal nostalgia for the real Chris Hemsworth. The performances of the actor Chris Hemsworth were, I guess, a payment of sorts for the VIP paddock passes. But this was performance absent of artistry captured and preserved by many for no real purpose. I don’t say this to shade Chris Hemsworth or the people pointing their phones at him. These behaviours are a product of what our world has told us to value.
At its core, art connects—even when it divides there is connection to be found within that division. This was something else entirely: a hollow charade of both art and connection in a world that values both less and less.
How did we choose to commemorate the weekend? My husband designed t-shirts for us all. It was cheesy af but it really gave the trip a sense of occasion. Every time I wear my tee I’ll remember the roar of the engines, the insane speed at which those bikes flew down the Gardner Straight, and the look on my Dad’s face as it all unfolded in front of him in real time.
